The release of KaOS 2025.09 has been published, a distribution with a rolling update model aimed at providing a desktop based on fresh KDE releases and applications using Qt. Notable design features include a vertical panel located on the right side of the screen. The distribution evolves with an outlook on Arch Linux but supports its own independent repository containing over 1500 packages and offers a range of proprietary graphical utilities. XFS is used as the default file system. Builds are published for x86_64 systems (4 GB).
Features of KaOS:
- On systems with UEFI, Systemd-boot is used for booting.
- An interface called IsoWriter is provided for writing ISO files to USB drives, supporting verification of the written images.
- LibreOffice is the default office suite, built with kf5 and Qt5 VCL plugins, allowing the use of native KDE and Qt dialogs, buttons, window frames, and widgets.
- The Croeso login welcome screen offers essential settings that may need to be changed after installation, and it also allows users to install applications and view information about the distribution and system.
- XFS is the default file system, with integrity checking (CRC) enabled and a separate btree index for free inodes (finobt).
- There is an option available to verify downloaded ISO files using digital signatures.
- On the system login screen, powered by the SDDM display manager, an option to launch in Wayland mode has been implemented. When operating with Wayland, the kwin_wayland composite manager is employed instead of the standard Weston.
- In the installer (Calamares), in automatic partitioning mode, there is an option to select the file system (XFS, EXT4, BTRFS, and ZFS) without switching to manual partitioning mode.
- In the Phonon sound library, which is used for working with sound devices in KDE, the phonon-mpv backend is used by default, supporting Qt 6 (the old backend based on VLC has not yet been ported to Qt6).
In the new version:
- Desktop components have been updated to Qt 6.9.2, KDE Frameworks 6.18.0, KDE Plasma 6.4.5, and KDE Gear 25.08.1. The KaOS Plasma Midna theme has been redesigned, a new icon set has been proposed, and the design of the splash and login screens has been changed. Window decorations have been altered. A new color scheme has been employed.
- The interface for installing additional programs KCP (KaOS Community Packages) has been rewritten. About 370 package repositories for KCP have been moved to the collaborative development service Codeberg.
- Initial support for using Plasma-login-manager instead of the SDDM login manager has been added. In the future, SDDM is planned to be replaced with Plasma-login-manager.
- The IsoImageWriter utility has been rewritten, which now not only can write ISO images to USB drives but also load ISO images from various distributions.
- KDE Frameworks packages tied to Qt5 have been removed from the repository. Qt5 libraries have been excluded from the base distribution starting with the June update but remain available for installation from repositories.
- Package versions have been updated: Linux kernel 6.16, Libxml2 2.14.6, Git 2.51, KBD 2.9.0, OpenCV 4.12.0, OpenEXR 3.4.0, Proj 9.7.0, Poppler 25.09.0, Gstreamer 1.26.6, Pipewire 1.4.8, systemd 254.27, ZFS 2.3.4, Meson 1.9.1, OpenSSL 3.5.3, Bash 5.3, Protobuf 32.1, and Mesa 25.2.3.
- In the Calamares installer, the use of a browser for generating the system login greeting page has been discontinued. Now, a QML Drawer-based component is used to display information.
- The Typst package has been added (a typesetting and text composition system developed as an alternative to LaTeX, offering a simple and clear syntax in the style of MediaWiki and Markdown).
- The Plasma Bigscreen package has been added (a KDE-based interface for multimedia devices and televisions).
- The Hydrogen package has been added (a drum machine for creating rhythmic music).
Source: opennet.ru
